How Small Businesses Should Be Using Direct Mail Marketing ...

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By Johann Williamson

Direct mail marketing is still a very powerful engine of small business growth. Even the rise of the internet has not displaced it, a fact which may be surprising to many, as it has been predicted time and again that the various electronic media would supplant traditional forms of communication, most particularly print.

The only place where this has proven to be true is in the music industry, where digital downloads have taken the place of older media. But of course music is exceptional, because it is an end in itself. Nobody is going to download hundreds of ads and listen to them or watch them for enjoyment.

And this brings us to a fact of life which all marketers, particularly in the broadcast media, must understand and accept: people avoid ads and marketing messages whenever they can, and they must be tempted in some manner in order to get them to pay attention.

Getting people to pay attention to broadcast or print media ads is several orders of magnitude more difficult than getting them to listen to music they enjoy. This is because obstacles have to be overcome. Some ways that these obstacles are overcome are

by placing the ads in the middle of shows or sporting events which people want to watch, or

in newspapers or magazines they like to read, or

by making the ads entertaining in and of themselves.

In other words, using entertainment to sell products through advertising is like the song, ?A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.?

And so why use direct mail? Direct mail is very different from broadcast media.

Here are some ways to look at the difference:

Whereas broadcast media hopes to draw people in by the use of entertainment, direct mail goes after the people who are believed to be good potential customers.

Broadcast media constantly strives to find new ways to entertain.
Direct mail constantly strives to identify real customers.

Broadcast media strives to be as broad in its message as possible.
Direct mail campaigns try to be as targeted as possible.

Broadcast media is, in a sense, blind. It throws out its message and hopes that someone will be moved to act. Direct mail campaigns try to be as clear-eyed as possible.

Broadcast media ads cost the same amount of money whether one thousand people see the ad or one hundred thousand people see it. With direct mail, each person you mail to costs you a set amount of money.

Direct mail has sharp vision: it uses such tools as analysis of customer buying habits in order to narrow down its focus to the best possible customers and to speak directly to them. Broadcast media targets everybody the same way and hopes for the best.

And so when you think in terms of direct mail, you have to take a different approach than the broadcast advertisers do. Obviously you have to have printed marketing materials which are well-designed and they can be enjoyable to read. However, the focus of a direct mail campaign needs always to be figuring out who your real customers are. If you are willing and able to do the homework, direct mail marketing can be the most cost-effective form of advertising there is.

The author, who is associated with Conquest Graphics, is a nationally recognized expert on all aspects of printing, print marketing, the internet and social media. Contact Conquest today for a discussion about how a direct mail campaign can help you grow your business.

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Soccer player defects from Cuba, requests asylum in US

Soccer player defects: A Cuban national soccer player disappeared while his team was playing in an Olympic soccer tournament in Tennessee.

Yosmel De Armas is a Cuban soccer player who has defected in order to seek asylum in the United States. While in Nashville, Tennessee last month for an Olympic qualifying soccer tournament, the Cuban midfielder was absent from his national team's final game against Canada, although he played on Saturday?s 4-0 loss to El Salvador.?

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When asked why the player skipped the game, the Cuban national coach said De Armas was sick and remained at the team's hotel. However, when the team left Nashville, the promising soccer player did not accompany his teammates on their return trip to the island nation.

Although US officials refused to comment about the player?s whereabouts, it was reported that De Armas was last seen in Miami.?

"We're preparing an asylum application to file with the Department of Homeland Security," attorney Alex Solomiany said, according to Reuters.?

The Miami-based lawyer, who?described his client as "nervous," said De Armas is "alone here"?and that he was on his way to Miami at the time of the game, contrary to the coach's allegations.

A rising number of Cuban athlete defections are explained by several factors: the continuous financial hardship the populace faces in Cuba, the plethora of defection precedents that make the process look easy, and the luring prospects of a better life, all coalesce to urge young athletes to follow this path.?

"This is another case of a Cuban sportsman trying to get a decent life, to try to take control of his own career," Omar Lopez told Reuters.? Lopez is general director of the Cuban American National Foundation, a Miami-based organization of Cuban exiles who seek political change on the island.

Four years ago, seven members of the Cuban under-23 national soccer team also sought political asylum after competing against its US counterpart in Tampa, Florida.?

"Of course, my heart will be in Cuba with my family, but I want to have the freedom to better my life, to play professional soccer, to be the best I can be, and for that we had to make this sacrifice," Yenier Bermudez told the Miami Herald, according to ESPN.

Since the 2002 CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central America, and Caribbean Association Football) tournament in Los Angeles, a total of 15 Cuban soccer players abandoned their teams and requested political asylum in the United States.

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Don't believe the headlines. Wind farms do not cause 'global' warming.

A recent study published in Nature Climate Change suggests that large wind farms could be pulling down hot air at night, raising the average temperature of the local region. The results of the study, however, have been widely misconstrued in the news media.?

All energy technologies have nuances and drawbacks. New research published in Nature Climate Change found that wind farms are no exception.

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Specifically, the study found that large tracts of wind turbines in remote areas of Texas appear to be increasing local surface temperatures. The results of this study have been misconstrued by certain media outlets as ironic evidence that a supposedly "green" technology is contributing to global warming, despite the lack of any supporting evidence.

Here are the facts: The team of researchers, led by SUNY Albany environmental scientist Liming Zhou, analyzed surface temperature data of Texan wind farms ? the data courtesy of NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. Zhou and his colleagues found that the immediate surroundings of the wind farms rose an average of 0.72 degrees Celsius between 2003 and 2011. The effect was most prominent at night. Some of the team has speculated that this localized warming trend could be an effect of the turbines pulling down warm air from higher altitudes at night, when the air above the land would otherwise be cooler.

In a recent University at Albany press release, Zhou warned that "the estimated warming trends only apply to the study region and to the study period, and thus should not be interpolated linearly into other regions (e.g., globally) or over longer periods (e.g., for another 20 years)," he said. "For a given wind farm, once there are no new wind turbines added, the warming effect may reach a stable level."

Yet exaggerated interpolation seems to be stock-in-trade for many of the media outlets covering this story. Take, for example, FOX News' headline: Wind farms are warming the Earth, or that of Forbes: Wind Farms Cause Global Warming! or that of the Inquistr's: Wind Farms May Contribute to Global Warming, or that of Newser: Latest Global Warming Culprit: Wind Farms.?It should be noted that nearly all of these stories contradict their own headlines by?explaining?that the observed effect was local.

This new study doesn't necessarily illustrate a causal link between wind turbines and localized warming, let alone temperature change on a global scale. The authors of the Nature paper were the first to admit that further science is needed to determine that exact nature of this link.

If it were true that the spinning blades of wind turbines increased the overall temperature of the planet, as opposed to simply redistributing thermal energy,?we would have to rewrite some basic laws of physics, particularly the?2nd law of thermodynamics.?This is an important distinction from the burning of fossil fuels, which produces gas that increases how much of the sun's energy the Earth retains. In this respect, this process contributes to a globally warming climate because the source of energy (the sun) is apart from the system that is warmed (the Earth.)

Rather than inform the public's perception on climate change, exaggerated coverage of this study has merely justified the common distrust scientists have for journalists.

The reality is that any alternative energy source is going to present problems. Over the past two years, there has been scientific investigation of whether wind turbines can affect the health of proximal residents, though the legitimacy of "Wind Turbine Syndrome", as it was called, was widely questioned. Natural gas has its problems with fracking, nuclear energy with radiation, and even solar cells with electronic waste. This recent study was merely exploring a similar issue in wind energy, but only so that we might effectively deal with it.

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